Gay parents will count in 2010 census

By Liz DeCarlo

Senior Editor

3/23/10 3:22 PM

When Laura McAlpine of Chicago helped her 18-year-old daughter
Amalia fill out college applications, she struggled with the most
basic portion of the form-filling in "father" and "mother." Amalia
is the daughter of two lesbian moms, borne of one and legally
adopted by McAlpine.

"There's nowhere on the forms to reflect our family accurately.
In the forms, you can only put down single," McAlpine says. "When I
called up (the colleges) about it, they just confirmed that that's
what I have to check. I got off the phone and cried."

Day after day, gay and lesbian families are confronted with the
fact that their family doesn't fit society's standards of what
makes a real family. "They face structural and social inequalities
every day. The kind of laws that they have to deal with
disadvantage their families," says Dr. Abby Goldberg, author of
Lesbian and Gay Parents and Their Children: Research on the Family
Life Cycle. "The way school forms are created, there's a space for
mother and father. Where does the other parent go? So many parents
are sick and tired of crossing things out (or) where they're told,
'We don't have a spot for that.'"

To make matters worse for McAlpine, even though she is legally
Amalia's second parent, a recent request for Amalia's birth
certificate for passport purposes revealed how the government
classifies her. When she opened up the document, it listed Amalia's
birth mother accurately. But she found her own name under
"father."

"I don't feel like a father," she says.

"Once in a while, we all have to say, this doesn't apply to my
family," Goldberg says. "Imagine dealing with this every day,
and undermining your family."

But there's one form that is going to begin reflecting the true
makeup of American families-the 2010 U.S. Census form, which begins
counting our population this month. For the first time, gay,
lesbian, transgender and bisexuals will be able to self-identify
themselves and be counted for who they really are.

Rainbow Program reaches out

When it comes to seeking help for family or relationship issues,
what works for heterosexual families doesn't necessarily work for
those headed by gay and lesbian parents. That's why the Family
Institute at Northwestern University has created the Rainbow Family program as part of its
Lesbian/Gay Counseling Program.

"The challenges (for the families) are different," says
psychologist Aaron Cooper, director of the Rainbow Families
program. "Very compelling and thorny questions sometimes come up."
The program's Web site features a blog with topics of interest to
Rainbow Families, as well as e-mail alerts about events and
activities throughout the Chicago area.

For information, call (847) 733-4300 ext. 1118.

"The beauty of it is, if someone believes they are married, then
they definitely put down married. It's self-identifiable-it doesn't
matter how you live, it's how you feel about your relationship,"
says Elizabeth Lopez Lyon, LGBT partnership specialist for the
Census Bureau.

Recent studies, including the 2000 census that classified these
parents as unmarried partners/roommates, indicate that 20-25
percent of same-sex couples have children living in their
household, says Martin O'Connell, chief of the fertility and family
statistic branch at the U.S. Census Bureau.

Experts like Aaron Cooper expect to see those numbers increase.
"The 2000 census had an impressive number of gay families raising
kids, and I think 2010 will show a big jump in that," says Cooper,
director of the Family Institute of Northwestern University's
Lesbian/Gay Counseling Program.

But while gay families will be counted in the same way as
heterosexual couples, it's only one pebble in a mountain of
discrimination.

"We are invisible to the world outside in terms of our identity
as a gay couple and as gay dads. Heterosexual couples with children
tend not to be invisible," says Cooper, himself the gay dad of a
son who is now 25. "We have had people say to us, when we walk in
somewhere with our son, 'Where's the boy's mother?' So we appear to
be an incomplete family, an invisible family. That's a level of
psychic stress for anyone … to live your lives where your identity
isn't corroborated by the world around you. And when a child hears
that, it challenges the child's perception of the family."

Taking gay families out of the shadows by collecting information
through the census will not only begin the validation process for
these families, it provides real statistics versus the anecdotal
information often thrown about when discussing gay and lesbian
families. "It's breaking those myths, that they're only in one area
…because they're in 99 percent of the counties in the United
States," says Lopez Lyons. "If they are wanting to make changes in
an area, they'll be able to say, here's how many we have in this
area. Listen to us, Congress."

O'Connell says the data will show same-sex couples "living as
families just as everyone else."

And it will be one form where a woman like Laura McAlpine won't
be called a father.